Someday Funnies

"Imitate young girls" is the English translation of the caption of this 1930's comic postcard from France. A joke about gender stereotyping, the ironic message seems to be 'Boys, you're never too young to start wearing perfume and make-up.'

Wearing Zuhair Murad (Source: Zuhair Murad)

Before and after selfies

Postcards from Provincetown

 

Actor femulating as Miss Deep South on stage in Pageant: The Musical.

 

Wearing B.B. Dakota.

Doing Girly Things

Lisa sent me three more Ask Me Anything questions and I decided to have a go at them before going into vacation mode.

1. Do you dream that you are a woman or do you dream that you are crossdressed and wake up wishing you had dreamed you were a genetic woman instead or something else?

Up front, I want to state that I seldom remember my dreams.

That being said I used to have dreams that I was crossdressing. Sometimes I would complete the transformation, but usually my transformation would be interrupted and never completed.

My dreams transitioned about two or three years ago and now I dream that I am a woman. Crossdressing no longer plays a part. Recently, I even dreamed that I was breastfeeding!

2.  What type of "normal" activities do you do en femme?  For example, do you go to salons?  Get you nails done?  Anything else "girly"?

I have never gone to a nail salon mainly because it would be a waste of money since most of my en femme outings are single days or nights out. For those short outings, my pre-glued stick-on nails are more economical.

I have thought about getting my nails done for multi-day outings and since you brought it up, I made a promise to myself to get my nails done the next time I am out for an extended stay.

Shopping is probably my girliest activity. I love doing the malls, browsing the racks, trying on clothes, trying on shoes and putting outfits together.

I also enjoy getting makeovers. I seem to average one a year and I love having a cosmetics professional have their way with me as I relax and take it all in.  

3.  You seem to only be quasi in the closet meaning it probably would not be hard for some people to figure out you are TG. Does that concern you or are you content to let things take their course?

It does not concern me at all. In fact, if anyone is curious enough to ask, I will tell them the truth, but no one has ever asked.

I have dressed en femme at work for three Halloweens and have worn bits and pieces of woman's clothing to work at other times. If my co-workers have not figured it out by now, I am very disappointed in their observation abilities.

In fact, most of the women and some of the guys I work with have had conversations with me that clearly indicated that they knew I was a T-girl. And that is ok by me.

Logan Keslar femulating on stage in La Cage Aux Folles, 2010.

Wearing Sue Wong.

Two Weird Ones

I often search eBay looking for images that depict femulation.

Occasionally, some of the images I find are so weird that I cannot figure out what was the intention of the image or what was the image actually depicting.

I came across two such images during my eBay search this week.

Here is the first one.

It is a postcard from the 1930s or 1940s. Both persons are wearing male clothing except for their shoes, which are women's high heel pumps. The person on the right is wearing what looks like a Zoot suit. Both persons have male haircuts and both look like they are wearing makeup. "Myrtle" is folding a handkerchief, which I assume is object referred to in the text "I Know What It's For."

My guess is that the postcard depicts two female-to-male crossdressers getting ready to go out and one is telling the other that she knows what a handkerchief is for.

Does anyone have a better idea what this is all about?

The second image that baffled me this week is a photograph from the UK circa 1920.

It depicts a group of men in white dresses, hosiery, and shoes. They have men's haircuts that have been feminized by combing the hair over their ears.

The seller on eBay states that the outfits may be "women's tennis clothes," but I see no evidence of tennis equipment.

I have no clue about what this image depicts --- do you?

Wardrobe Shift

Found this postcard from the UK on eBay. Postmarked 1913, it depicts a startling contrast in his and her clothing before and after marriage.

82 Club Postcard

I added this postcard to my female impersonator ephemera collection.

The postcard depicts the performers at New York City's 82 Club (also known as "Club 82") circa 1960. The nightclub was in the East Village at 82 East 4th St. It had a 20 year run and closed its doors for good in 1978.

Before and After

I am not sure what was the original intention of this early 20th Century postcard.

It follows the theme of the anti-suffrage propaganda, that is, if women got the right to vote, it would lead to a gender role reversal.

But the postcard makes no reference to the suffrage movement. So  is it anti-marriage propaganda or simply a joke about the state of harried married males?

In any case, the male’s femulation is disappointing.

P.S. The woman in the before and after scenarios looks like the same woman, but the male looks different. In addition to wearing a dress, he looks shorter and has a mustache in the "after" scene.

Random Thoughts on a Freezing Friday

Thank Goddess It’s Friday

Here is an idea for a new American restaurant chain. Call it “Thank Goddess It’s Friday” and staff if with male waitresses like they do in Japan.

Fly Me, I'm Stana

Which brings up the story, blogged about here a couple of times (1) (2), about the new Thai airline, PC Air, hiring transwomen as flight attendants.

PC Air made a big deal about being the first airline to hire transwomen as flight attendants “in an effort to promote equal opportunities for what's called the 'third sex in Southeast Asia.”

Maybe they are the first airline to openly hire transwomen as flight attendants, but I think it is likely that other airlines have hired transwomen (in stealth or not) as flight attendants in the past (and did not publicize it). I have no proof for that assertion, but transwomen are everywhere and I'm sure they are in the stewardess ranks, too.

This story tears me.

On the one hand, PC Air did a good thing, but on the other hand, they soiled their good deed by forcing the trans flight attendants to wear special badges so that civilians can differentiated the trans from the non-trans attendants. WTH? If they were really interested in promoting equal opportunities, PC Air should have had the trans flight attendants wear generic badges and let them blend in with the non-trans attendants.

Androgynous Andrej Pejic... Not!

IMHO, Andrej has moved up the gender spectrum from androgynous to transgender. Welcome to the "girls'" club, Miss Pejic!

Football Player Chorus Girl Mystery

While shopping at Ocean State Job Lot yesterday, I noticed shelves of designer postcards on sale, ten for a dollar.

Being a postcard collector, I was in heaven. Being a femulator, I was elated to find the postcard (pictured above) among the hundreds that were for sale.

The description on the back of the card reads, “Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (‘Wooly Bully’) with football players dressed as chorus girls.”

The source of the image was a mystery.

I saw Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs perform live in concert back in the mid-1960s and I can assure you there were no football players dressed as chorus girls fronting the band.

I thought that the source of the image might be a Hollywood film, so I searched IMDB and discovered that Sam and the Pharaohs appeared in a 1965 opus titled When the Boys Meet the Girls with Connie Francis, Harve Presnell, Louis Armstrong, Liberace, and Herman's Hermits (Wow!).

I did not find the football player chorus girls image on the Internet, but I did find other images of Sam and the band from the film wearing the same outfits performing on the same stage, so I'd say “mystery solved.”

Vampire Girls

Looking for femulations on eBay, I came across an unusual postcard depicting a vaudeville act called “Vampire Girls Company.” The “girls” are actually boys and according to the postcard, they were performing at the “New Garden Theatre.”

The back of the postcard indicates that Waterloo, IA was the site of photo on the front of the postcard. I can find no other information concerning the Vampire Girls.   

women will wear the breaks

I discovered this vintage postcard on eBay this past week. It is another anti-suffrage propaganda postcard, which predicted that males will wear the skirts after females get the vote.

'nuff said

...especially with those shoes!

(A vintage postcard, circa 1940)

What Will Men Wear When Women Wear Trousers? - Part 2

When the other shoe drops, it will be a high heel pump.

The predictions of the anti-suffrage propagandists described in Part 1 did not come to pass.

Or did they?

In the U.S., females got the vote in 1919, but they did not immediately drop their skirts and pull up trousers. A female in trousers was a rarity until World War II. During the war, switching from skirts to trousers was a practical choice for females who worked in factories in place of males who were fighting the war.

When females entered the workforce, they not only discovered fashion freedom, but they also discovered financial freedom, which decreased or eliminated their dependency on males for financial support.

After the war, females continued to work and wear trousers as a fashion choice. During the second half of the 20th Century, the popularity of bifurcated female clothing grew steadily.

Today, females wear pants more often than not. I know young females who do not own a skirt or a dress. My female boss has worn a skirted garment to work only once and that was on a "casual dress" day of all days! At all other times, she wears something bifurcated.

Meanwhile, on the male fashion front, most males continued wearing bifurcated garments.

Beginning in the 1960s (at about the time that the woman's liberation movement was put into motion), fashion designers began testing the waters of skirted male garments.

Every few years, a fashion designer or two would introduce skirts for boys. Each time, there would be some (or sometimes a lot of) press coverage about the new male fashion, but that was the extent of it because few males bought into wearing skirts.

Since the turn of the century, there has been a change because females are on the ascent, while males are on the descent.

In the last 30 years, females have replaced males in the workforce at an accelerating rate. This rate will continue to accelerate because more females graduate from college than boys do, so more qualified females will continue to replace the less qualified boys.

Females have the momentum, while the old boys are fighting to protect the status quo, i.e., the old status quo.

We are now experiencing the first generation of working in home fathers (WIHFs). The wihf movement started slowly, but gained momentum as the ascent of females gained momentum.

During the recent recession, more males lost jobs than females and during the recovery, fewer males were able to return to work than females. So even more boys resigned themselves to being a wihf, while more females became the sole financial support of their families.

As a result, there is a growing number of youths, who lived in families where the female was the breadwinner and the male was the homemaker. That is all they know and as a result, those young females believe that it is their duty to be the breadwinner, while those young males believe that being a wihf is in their future.

So, why should a young male bother going to college? All a boy has to do is bide his time and work at some job until a female takes him for her wihf. This is not a fantasy - witness the recent "fad" that finds females asking boys to marry them while presenting their future wihf with an engagement ring. And many a wihf has acknowledged his status in his relationship to his spouse by taking her surname when he marries.

To further affirm the ascent of females, our "father figures" are now female. A few generations ago, Walter Cronkite was America' s father figure. Today, Katie Couric sits in Walter's seat and her sisters proliferate the anchor seats in the majority of America's newsrooms.

And you betcha that it won't be long before a female is president.

Getting back to the fashion designers... they are a persistent bunch. They kept on testing the waters of "skirts for males" and finally, some boys took the bait.

This success spurred designers to offer even more feminized fashions for boys and the past few seasons have been full of runways with male models wearing skirts, dresses, and other items borrowed from milady's wardrobe.

Males also began wearing makeup, perfume, pantyhose, panties, girdles, bras, purses, etc. They might call these items by different names in order to give them a more masculine identity, but a "murse" by any other name is still a purse.

Admittedly, the number of males adopting these styles is in the minority, but the minority is growing, especially among the male youth. Boys now want to look attractive (in order to attract a mate). As more boys realize that their station in life is to attract a female in order to become her wihf, they will buy into the new feminized definition of masculinity.

Who would have thought that males would remove all their body hair because it fits the new definition? But there are products like Nair for males that are intended to remove body hair, not just leg hair.

Personally, what really surprises me are male high heels. If I had to choose the last feminine item that males would adopt as their own, I would have picked high heels just ahead of male tampons. But fashionable boys are wearing high heel pumps right off the shelves of the ladies' side of the shoe stores. If you don't believe me, visit the High Heels for Men blog to be convinced.

On my recent visits to New York City, I witnessed feminized male fashions everywhere, which is no surprise in the Big Apple. But, I have also noticed a growing number of boys in the suburbs of Connecticut dressing in a more feminine style.

Things are changing slowly, but steadily.

Meanwhile, the designers are in a frenzy fielding feminized male fashions like never before. The recent seasons have seen the runways full of boys modeling skirts, dresses and other feminine apparel.

The designers are trying to give boys more choices, but a lot of the choices are skirted. When a boy goes shopping in the near future, he may find nothing but skirted clothing for sale.

Visit The New Male Fashion blog to see what I mean.

(Part 3 of "What Will Men Wear When Women Wear Trousers?" will appear here tomorrow.)

What Will Men Wear When Women Wear Trousers? – Part 1

In the early 20th Century, anti-suffrage propaganda suggested that if women obtained the right to vote, they would not stop there; soon they would displace males in society and become the dominant gender relegating males to secondary status in society, that is, the subservient role previously occupied by females.

For example, an anti-suffrage postcard asked, “What will men wear when women wear (trousers)?”

A German postcard provided the answer. Titled “Modern Marriage,” it depicts a female wearing trousers standing besides a male wearing a dress. The female is holding a hairbrush in an intimidating manner as if she is threatening her spouse to keep him in line, meanwhile, the man is nursing a baby.

Another German postcard titled “Pictures from the Women's State,” portrays various scenes as the matriarchy makes progress in a post-suffrage world.

The left side of the postcard contains images of wives disciplining hapless husbands. In the upper image, a wife threatens her husband with a carpet beater, while he stands in the middle of broken crockery. In the lower image, a wife has her husband over her knee and is spanking him with a shoe, while their smiling daughter looks on being educated about the relationship of females and males in the post-suffrage world.

The caption accompanying the image in the center of the postcard reads, “While the women will wear trousers, the men will wear none at all.” The accompanying drawing shows two dapper women wearing suits with trousers. The women also wear hats (one a top hat, the other a felt hat), carry canes, smoke (one a cigar, the other a pipe), and have short hairstyles. Also, the cigar-smoking woman wears a monocle.

Standing nearby are two post-suffrage males in ankle-length dresses. One male wears a picture hat that matches his dress, which is trimmed with ruffles and lace. He also carries a purse. The other male is lifting the side of his dress slightly to reveal a blue petticoat (blue is for boys).

The scenes on the right side of the postcard depicts further role reversal. The upper image shows a female in a suit with a bowtie carrying her top hat and cane in one hand and a smoking pipe in the other. She is dressed like a professional and is either on her way to the office or returning home. Her husband stands by wearing a yellow blouse and red skirt while holding a baby.

The lower image shows two female chimney sweeps. Perhaps one is married to the househusband in the scene or maybe they have been hired by the househusband’s wife to clean the chimney. The househusband, in a white blouse and red skirt, stands over a wooden tub doing the laundry.

Postcards predicting the ascent of females and the fall of males were typical of the era. I have seen hundreds of postcards from that era sending the same message, but the postcard on the right kind of says it all:

Woman is doing the work of man,
So She’ll wear the trousers, if she can,
And it’s quite easy to prophecy,
What Pa will look like, by and by.

As you know, the anti-suffrage propaganda did not work. Females got the vote.

Folks viewing the propaganda today may find it quaint and amusing. But before you dismiss the anti-suffrage message consider the modern image on the right. Except for the updated wardrobes, there’s not much difference with the postcard above it, is there?

(Part 2 of "What Will Men Wear When Women Wear Trousers?" will appear here tomorrow.)

And, by the way, you can click on any image to enlarge it.

travestis parisiens

Updated Below

I collect female impersonator ephemera. (You can view my collection here.)

During my search for additions to my collection, I often encounter a set of early 20th Century postcards from France titled “Travestis Parisiens,” which translates to “Parisian Transvestites.” The postcards depict a person in various stages of dress/undress being assisted by an angel. The beautiful images are artist signed Jean Tam.

Are the transvestites depicted by artist Tam males dressing as females or females dressing as males or both. The postcards appear below; you be the judge.

By the way, these postcards are too expensive for me and are not part of my collection.

UPDATE: I don't speak French, so I used Babel Fish to translate "Travestis Parisiens" from French to English and it cam up with "Parisian Transvestites."

According to Jamiegottagun, who knows how to mind her French P's and Q's, Babel Fish is wrong and the correct translation is "Dressing up Parisian." Therefore, the persons depicted in the postcard images are not necessarily transvestites, although the females donning men's duds are definitely crossdressing.

 

crossdressed in the past

Milo was a German female impersonator (a professional femulator) depicted on this postcard postmarked in May 1919, almost 90 years ago.

reorganized ephemera

I reorganized my ephemera pages.

Instead of displaying everything on one page, I organized the collection according to location.

The United States pages are almost fully populated, while the United Kingdom and Continental Europe pages are sparse. I plan to add ephemera to those pages as soon as possible, i.e., as soon as I have time to scan the items.

crossdressed in the past

yet another ephemera update

I have yet another new addition to my ephemera collection: a postcard from The Beige Room in San Francisco.

my ephemera update

I have two new additions to my ephemera collection: a postcard and a souvenir photograph from Club 82 / 82 Club in NYC.

my ephemera update

I added a new postcard to My Ephemera Web page. An eBay acquisition, the postcard is from The Beige Room in San Francisco. It is not postmarked or dated, but it looks to be circa 1960.